COLORING OUR COLLECTION

The Dons have cultivated a formidable reputation for our coloring book prowess. So, when recent jealous whispers arose that USF had perhaps hit our coloring peak, we at Gleeson Library took them seriously.

After all, we wondered, can any coloring experience surpass our own well stocked Coloring Break Table with its rainbows of sharpened pencils at the ready to capture every moment of shading genius? Could we really improve our craft when the @GleesonLibrary instagram is already adorned with finished pages of such brilliance it seems perposterous to attempt bettering them? What was the next level? Was there even a next level? Well my friends we found our answer:

TO TRULY MASTER THE COLORING BOOK,

ONE MUST BECOME THE COLORING BOOK.

The solution arrived in early February by way of the cutting-edge minds at the New York Academy of Medicine. NYAM and other institutions created curated coloring sheets. All imagery was sourced directly from their own internal collections giving community members a unique opportunity to engage with the work. Once a patron had finished putting their personal spin on whichever piece they had selected they were invited to share via the hashtag #ColorOurCollections.

Needless to say, we turned our attentions to our own stacks.

Our valiant journey through the library labyrinth spanned many ancient non-copyrighted volumes. There were monsters slouching around the periphery of monastic manuscripts, sharks immortalized in fossil form and dinosaur sketches from the earliest American digs. We returned victorious bearing these and other trophies.

The pages we lay before you, dear Dons, are the fruit of our stacks. Take up your pencils. Your time has come.